Marissa Mayer Takes the Helm as CEO of Yahoo

The big surprise in the tech industry this week is the appointment of former Google executive Marissa Mayer as CEO of Yahoo. The announcement was met with mostly positive reactions, even after Mayer revealed she is giving birth to her first child in October and will not be taking maternity leave.

Marissa Mayer is the new CEO of Yahoo

Yahoo is like the elderly statesman of the Internet. It’s been around from the beginning, but in recent years has been overshadowed by newer, younger companies like Google and Facebook, as well as its “CEO Curse,” having gone through five CEOs in as many years. The question is will Mayer be able to turn things around for the company that was once the top site for web search? The answer may depend on which direction she decides to take the company.

These days, most people use Yahoo for email services and as a web portal for news and entertainment. Search is dominated by Google with Microsoft’s Bing breathing down its neck, and Facebook has made it difficult to crack social media, effectively shutting out Google + so far. Yahoo owns the photo sharing site Flckr and some are hoping that Mayer will salvage it, which would mean going head to head with Instagram, the photo sharing app recently purchased by Facebook for $1 billion. Also, taking into consideration that Mayer’s last position at Google was as VP in charge of local, maps and location services, she could try to dominate the local/mobile market, an open niche that has no clear leader at the moment.

Do you think Mayer can save Yahoo? What do you think her strategy should be?

Counting Down Around the World

It has been a tradition since the early 1900s to celebrate the famous “New Year’s Eve Ball Drop of Times Square.” But do you ever wonder how others around the world bring in the big day? There was a neat posting in the Bing Community today referencing just this. Did you know that the Japanese culture typically brings in the New Year by more calming activities such as cleaning the house? Check out Bing’s “New Year’s Around the World” for some amazing images.

So from New York to Australia [and everyone in between] and however you prefer to bring in the New Year -- may it be a prosperous one for all!

Are Your Pages On Google Changing?

On Monday, Google launched real-time search results which will break up the page. From breaking news stories, Twitter feeds and blogs, the page will refresh automatically. You have the option to pause Google’s feed as well. Not all terms trigger the real time feature since information is not updated on a daily basis. Bing has also enabled this feature too for users which some are saying you are guaranteed to find more real-time results on a wider range of topics.

Google and Bing Gaining Market Share

A measurement by Comscore shows increases in the percentage of searches running through Google and Microsoft servers from September to October. Where did the additional market share come from? Yahoo!

While Google continues to dominate the market accounting for 64.9% of all searches in September and picking up an additional .5% in October. Microsoft matched Google by picking up an additional .5% in October, now accounting for 9.9% of all searches. This is bad news for Yahoo, as they have been steadily declining throughout the year. If these trends continue, we just may see Bing overtake Yahoo in market share by the end of the year.

Bing Looking to Increase Market Share with Visual Search

Bing has announced its next tactic to compete with Google in search. They are taking image searching a step further with “Visual Search”. Visual Search returns thumbnail images for specific search results. The main feature of Visual Search is the ability to refine a query, thus making the thumbnails that no longer match fly off the results page. The remaining thumbnails are in turn resorted.

The value of Visual Search is the blending of structured data into search results. Bing is pushing the envelope by returning structured data in a wider range of searches, including sports, travel, and product reviews.